The Labour leader’s populist approach isn’t working – precision and honesty
are required

Exit, pursued by a bear. Shakespeare’s best-known stage direction has been repackaged by Lord Lawson, who warns that Britain must flee the EU or risk being crushed in the maw of the Eurozone bloc. There would be “some economic cost”, as Margaret Thatcher’s former chancellor admits, but that would swiftly be outweighed.

Lord Lawson’s confidence is far from universal. Nick Clegg says that leaving the EU would jeopardise as many as three million jobs, while the European trade commissioner is less circumspect. It would be “madness”, in the view of Karel de Gucht, to quit the EU just as it is about to strike a major trade deal with the US.

No prizes for guessing whose side they are on in Boston, Lincolnshire, the epicentre of the Ukip rout in which the party seized 23 per cent of the vote across the country last week. For the first time, I can identify with the plaint of Ukip voters. I too now feel like a stranger in my own land. Boston is my home town, and I can see how it fell under the spell of Nigel Farage.

I mean no insult to my fellow-townsfolk when I say that Boston was, for many years, a place that time forgot. That amnesia was evident in the modest home where I spent my early years without a fridge, a phone, a television or a car. Boston was a place of simple tastes, and my family’s were simpler than most.

The mood that swept a mother, her two daughters and many other Ukip candidates into local council seats was embedded long before Friday’s victories. Once, the Pilgrim Fathers, betrayed by their ship’s captain, were handed over to the local authorities before they could set sail for America. Many centuries on, the town hardened its heart against a second wave of pilgrims.

Though Boston is now known as the little Poland of the Fens, the Portuguese arrived first. Despite the generosity of many helpers, including the churches, one newcomer and her baby reportedly had their home set on fire, while others paid exorbitant rent, slept 20 to a room and worked gruelling hours for a £25 a week from gangmasters.

These agricultural workers were not stealing local jobs. In 2006, unemployment was around one per cent, few locals fancied potato picking, and little subsidised housing went to migrants. There was great pressure on local services, but the main problems were the trivial and vast cultural schisms that destroy communities. With only eight part-timers available to integrate thousands of incomers into schools, some English parents kept their children home as a protest against a classroom celebration of Portuguese customs.

A decaying seaport was reinvigorated by immigrants’ toil, but the spirit of renaissance failed to take root. Last week’s wins, distilled from nostalgia, fear, neglect and venom, should be studied by every party leader and strategist who hopes to halt the Ukip charge. The made-in-Boston look about today’s Queen’s Speech implies that David Cameron has drawn the wrong conclusions. Restricting immigrants’ benefits, stopping Thai brides getting British pensions and crackdowns on crime suggest a sop to Ukip rather than a coherent legislative programme.

Nor, I imagine, do my townsfolk want to be patronised by Tory politicians who tell them that they “get it” when they plainly don’t. Lurching Right is a dead end for Mr Cameron, who risks trimming towards Mr Farage’s Olde Worlde dystopia – nasty, punitive and bristling with the extravagant defences of a tinpot regime – while capturing none of the allure that makes the Ukip leader a magnet for rear-view-mirror romantics who hanker for the past and who loathe domineering politicians.

Yet the greater challenge is to Ed Miliband. However you dress up last week’s results, Labour’s 29 per cent of the vote is underwhelming, particularly since Mr Miliband opted for a deliberately populist approach designed to energise and grow the grassroots. While there is no discernible sense of panic or disloyalty, one senior figure says that “it is now a matter of urgency” for Mr Miliband to be much clearer about what he would do in office.

As Ivan Lewis, the development spokesman, writes in the New Statesman, the last government’s “failure to talk about family and community left the impression that we saw Britain’s future only through the prism of state and market”. Technocracy dies hard, and for all Mr Miliband’s undoubted skill at pallet populism, the public does not yet agree that he, as his champions once boasted, “speaks human”.

The greater problem is economic credibility. “It has plagued us throughout our history and it plagues us now,” says one senior figure. “People don’t yet trust us with their money.” If Labour’s offer is to protect health and education, ringfence international aid, build many more homes and bring in a proper social care system, then it must sell that prospectus and explain how it proposes to reduce the deficit.

Belatedly, Labour is shifting away from vague suggestions that the growth fairy would heal the broken economy. Past indecision cut no ice in Boston or elsewhere. If the days of boom have gone for ever, as some economists suspect, then the social democrats whose programmes are tailored to good times need a new story more speedily than ever. That does not mean an instant manifesto, but nor will vision suffice. Voters deserve precision and honesty, and the main parties have offered neither.

Mr Cameron has become adept at the politics of stealth. On international aid, for example, he has fractured our relations with South Africa, a vital partner, by withdrawing £19 million in aid while quite forgetting to tell taxpayers that he has spent extra billions of pounds of their money. There is an honourable and strategic case for aid, but Mr Cameron seems increasingly afraid to make it.

Equally, there are excellent grounds for Mr Miliband to promise to spend more in the short run while guaranteeing cutting hard in the medium term, once the economy recovers. If even Labour acts as if this remedy is a furtive fix rather than a virtuous solution, it can hardly expect voters to back it.

Anyone who doubts that the Left is adept at converting triumph to disaster should reflect, on François Hollande’s first anniversary in office, on the fate that befalls leaders who lack a coherent programme and the management skills to see it through. Mr Miliband, whose sense of direction is much clearer than that of the French president, must share his route map with the voter.

Political tumbleweed drifts across the centre ground which, once a crush of competing camps, is now emptying as the Tories head off to Farageland. Mr Miliband has a vacant space to pitch his One Nation marquee, and he should use it. I doubt if he will ever be big in Boston, but my kind and thoughtful former townsfolk would listen with interest to a clear Labour message on the economy and on how Lord Lawson has got it wrong on Europe.

Exit, pursued by a bear? In A Winter’s Tale, the fleeing Antigonus duly gets eaten alive. And so, if Britain walked out of the EU, would we.